Calacanis: Why AOL Search Sucks

In Project #2: Fixing AOL Search (or “we need to love our users a little more”), blogmeister Jason Calacanis provides a detailed explanation of why he thinks AOL Search is “Bad… Very, very bad.” despite using search leader Google to provide the data.

Calcanis provides a detailed analysis of the flaws he sees. The problem isn’t speed, it’s simplicity. People use Google because it’s clean and simple, while AOL is cluttered. He provides illustrative screenshots showing how Google starts the organic results a mere 238 pixels from the top of the screen and beginning from the left page margin. Yahoo and MSN aren’t far behind at 300 pixels and 285 pixels from the top, respectively. AOL search, by comparison, runs a pile of paid links that push the results down 538 pixels, and then compounds the problem by pushing them in from the left margn by 198 pixels to make room for various search navigation elements.

This is one of the simplest, most illustrative comparative analyses of search engine interfaces I’ve seen, and it shows how even with the best search results in the business you can still create a search engine that few people want to use. The fact that it comes from Jason Calacanis, who now works for AOL following their acquisition of his firm, is surprising indeed. Kudos to him for reducing the screen real estate issue to something even a senior executive can understand.